An unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), also referred to as an unmanned drone or drone, is an aircraft that does not carry a human operator and is remotely piloted by a remote terminal operated by an operator on the ground.
In order for operation of the UAV(s), an operator of the UAV generally needs to send various control instructions to the UAV using a remote terminal. In certain applications, the remote terminal may run a special application, and have a touch screen capable of displaying a graphic user interface (GUI) with several virtual input buttons. By touching on the virtual input buttons displayed on the touch screen, the operator can enter inputs corresponding to desired control instructions. For example, the graphic interface may include a virtual input button corresponding to a taking-off instruction for the UAV, and the taking-off instruction can be transmitted from the remote terminal to the UAV immediately after the operator touches the virtual input button.
However, in some environments such as under a cold temperature (e.g. below −30 degree-C) or when a surface of the touch screen is wet (e.g. when it rains), the touch screen may not respond to the operator's touch actions correctly, which adversely affects the operation of the remote terminal and the UAV.
Furthermore, the flight of the UAV in the air is three-dimensional and may have at most six degrees of freedom, including three degrees of freedom for linear movement and three other degrees of freedom for rotatory movement. However, the touch screen is a two-dimensional input device and thus can only sense a one-dimensional or two-dimensional touch action. Thus, it is difficult to control the flight of the UAV using the touch screen.
Thus, there is a need for further improvements.